Rejecting the legacy of shame - Part 3

Acknowledging the pain of lifelong separation

“There’ll be icicles and birthday clothes

And sometimes there’ll be sorrow”

(Joni Mitchell, Little Green, 1971)

With the passing by the UK parliament of the Children Act 1975, media publicity about Jigsaw, the National Association and Register of Adoptees and their Natural Mothers, shot up, and demand for its services grew at an alarming rate. It became clear that Jigsaw could no longer be run solely by Angela Hamblin and a single volunteer, from Angela’s kitchen. Growing demand for its services could only be met if the organisation received some outside support, enabling it to rent some office space and pay volunteers’ expenses.  But this was a time of acute economic crisis and it soon became clear that such outside support would not be available.

In May 1976, the decision was reluctantly taken to close Jigsaw, not because it had failed but because the resources to sustain its growth were not available. The final meeting was tearful, but it ended on a positive note, resolving  to produce a booklet that would convey what Jigsaw had aimed to achieve - restoring the bonds between mothers and their children that had been torn apart by adoption.

That Summer, an official from the  Department of Health and Social Services contacted Angela to indicate that they had taken on board Jigsaw’s suggestions about the need for a contact register for adoptees and their ‘birth parents’, and hinted that they might in due course set up their own register (this did eventually materialise in1991). Angela  was delighted that the contact register idea would be taken up (it was also taken up in the early 1980s by NORCAP, an organisation founded by adoptee Pam Hodgkins). Angela was however concerned about the language that the DHSS official used - she disliked the reductive connotations of the term ‘birth parent’, and was doubtful about including fathers (who had all too often abandoned the mothers long before birth).

Parting Sorrows

The 1975 Children Act required that adoptees had to be counselled by a local authority or adoption agency social worker before they could see their birth certificate. Writing in the Guardian in March 1975,  Angela had questioned what social workers could offer.  “I speak as a qualified social worker,” she wrote. “But I know the real help I would offer in a counselling situation would be on the basis of my experiences of losing my child and the feelings engendered at the possibility of seeing him again, not on the basis of my social work training.” Her doubts, particularly regarding social workers employed by adoption agencies, were reinforced by her experience at an adoption conference:

“At an adoption conference last year, the natural mothers attempted to talk about their experiences. Afterwards they were approached by one of the senior adoption workers present and asked to desist from making such statements in public again. They were, she said, destroying the image of adoption which she and her colleagues were working so hard to promote. If this image of adoption relies so heavily on the suppression of the truth about natural mothers, maybe it is an image whose destruction is long overdue.”

(Angela Hamblin, Parting Sorrows, Guardian 16 June 1976).

”Parting sorrows’, an article that Angela wrote for the Guardian women’s page in June 1976, was an indictment of the inhumanity of a system that deprived single mothers of support and forced them to relinquish their babies. The article was accompanied by a poignant Posie Simmonds cartoon -  an image of a tearful woman, constructed from the repeated words ‘no option’, handing her baby to the image of another woman, constructed from the repeated word ‘adoption’.

An article in the Sunday Times, ‘Adoption Rights’, followed in October 1976. Here, Angela argued that it was now time to acknowledge the right of mothers to know who their children had become. “For the women who have suffered so much and given so much,” she concluded, “is this really so much to ask?”

The Other Side of Adoption

The Other Side of Adoption, the 98 page booklet which Angela and I edited and produced in 1977, included advice and information on tracing compiled by Jigsaw volunteer Alice Kerr, personal stories of natural mothers and adoptees that had been submitted by Jigsaw members, and an introductory essay by Angela on the history of adoption.

Jill Knight’s opposition in parliament to adoptees having the right to see their birth certificate was based on what she saw as the need to protect women from the shame of having given birth to an ‘illegitimate’ child. It was clear that any shame felt by the mothers who contributed to the Jigsaw booklet was a shame that had been imposed on them, by their family, by society, and in mother and baby homes. But what stood out from these contributions was not shame, but pain - the pain of having no choice but to have to give up their child and endure lifelong separation. Writing these accounts and seeing them in print was a healing experience for the contributors. It was impossible to read these stories and not be moved and outraged by them.

Birthday pain

Birthdays were difficult for the mothers in Jigsaw. Here’s a poem that Angela wrote for the son who had been taken from her. She wrote it in 1974, the year before she founded Jigsaw and was able to reunite with him.  It’s published here for the first time, at her suggestion.

Birthday

if we met today

we would not know

each other

yet nineteen years

ago

you kicked violently

inside my womb

eager to

get out

you emerged

three months early

yet still you held

your tenacious

grip on life,

confounding them all.

they took you

away

and i never did

fill the hole

they left inside me

torn and bleeding

where you’d lived

for years

i looked

in prams

at toddlers

schoolboys

adolescents

young men

and wondered if one

of them was

you

If we met today

would we meet

as mother and son or

as people?

would we like

each other?

could we grasp the

separateness

of the nineteen years

that have parted

us?

could we face

the judgements

in each other’s eyes?

could we dare

to reach beyond

them?

could we defy

what society

has made

of us?

look for me next year

my son.

find me wanting

but find me.

twenty years now

since the pain

of separation began

and still I wait

for

your return.

The next post will focus on Angela’s exploration, in The Other Side of Adoption, of the origins of adoption secrecy in the nineteenth century double standard which punished women for the crimes of men. And it will ask ask how much has changed.

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